Monday, July 22, 2013

Zinn in Indiana

My late home state, Indiana, has
made headlines.That is, a 2010 telegram
asking heads of all state education departments to ensure that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States be
removed from Indiana schools’ use at all levels, now that Zinn was finally
dead, by then governor, now Purdue U president Mitch Daniels, has just come to
light.

Jill and I were privileged in
1983 to have Bill Breeden introduce us to Zinn when Zinn keynoted a little symposium
our friend Jim Hart, in religious studies at Indiana U-Bloomington, had
organized to explore setting up a peace studies program at IUB.(Many of us taught versions of peace studies;
I was on “peace studies” “individualized major” students’ committees; there was
never a campus curriculum.)Bill Breeden
was at the time a newly retired young Disciples of Christ minister.He and his young family lived off the land;
he drove a truck part-time to get some cash.I got him to apply to our MA
program in criminal justice.In 1984 he
became my defacto co-professor teaching my “alternative social control systems”
class, required for criminal justice majors.There we added Zinn’s People’s
History” to Bill Moyer’s book and pbs series on The Secret Government to our required reading.Bill, now a UU minister in Bloomington, got
written up in Zinn’s last edition as the only person to do time for Iran-Contra
(where I had the privilege of being co-counsel at a jury trial for the only
time in my life).

Over time I also used Zinn’s Declarations of Independence and my last
hard copy text, Voices of a People’s
History of the United States, compiled by co-editor and Bloomington native Anthony
Arnove.Whether in Norway, Poland or
Tanzania, my gift of choice was A People’s
History.I had the further privilege
of spending some personal time with Howard.His work came along when I was looking for ways to bridge criminal
justice locally and internationally.That was critical to me at a point in my career when I had peaked in
scholarly reputation, and increasingly marginalized in “the” criminal justice
literature.The growing popularity of a
book Zinn had first published in 1981 fortified me to continue to listen and
air less heard voices first, as ample human justification for tenured
professorship.In sum, Zinn remains my
academic role model.

The eighties and nineties were
rather tumultuous politically times for me locally in South Central
Indiana.I hadn’t yet learned to refrain
from winning arguments with my students.I know my teaching angered many students, including criminal justice
majors for whom I was at once politically outrageous and an easy A.I had two or three hundred students a
semester in what was generally the only offering of the class.I wonder how many of them came home to Our
Man Mitch Daniels showing him the stuff I was requiring my students to write
about for a grade.His email indicates
that he found outrageous untruths about US history “on every page.”

I have long noticed and noted
that if you take the path Howard and I have chosen, there is no telling what
effect may spring from one’s own social control efforts, especially as an “educator.”
I am pretty sure that I was among the first to adopt the book, in a required
class for criminal justice majors at Indiana’s “flagship” liberal arts
institution of all places no less.I
know some of my former associate instructors used the book when they taught
summer sessions or when I was away.Who
knows?

I used to tell myself that
making people angry over things I cared about was better than being
ignored.I also had students who had
left my class angry come back to teach with me, or in other ways changed even
life course.Now we learn that Howard
Zinn’s death in 2010 uncovered years of rage that the governor of Indiana had
accumulated over my being allowed to teach what I did with such joy and enthusiasm.Thanks, Mitch, you flatter me beyond my
wildest expectations.Love and
peace--hal

About Me

I retired Jan. 2009 from after 33 years on the criminal justice faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. I continue not to charge for any form of public service, including speaking and consulting, and now have plenty of free time to do so on request. I do not do social networking. I regularly monitor just one email account: pepinsky@indiana.edu; my home phone number is 1-614-885-6341; my skype name is halpep. My papers and such are archived at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?brand=general&docId=InU-Ar-VAA9639.xml&doc.view=entire_text.
I am known as a co-founder of "peacemaking criminology." Page proofs of my latest, 2006 U of Ottawa Press book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, are freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf , the end of which lists my publications, nine books and over 80 articles and chapters in all, on a wide range of subjects from the international to the interpersonal level. My preceding book, A Criminologist's Quest for Peace, is also freely available at http://critcrim.org/pepinsky, and a pdf of Myths That Cause Crime is on the critcrim.org home page.